‘Coming!’ I called, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear in the self-conscious gesture of a woman about to meet her lover. ‘Just coming!’
He rang again. That series of staccato jabs on the bell was unlike him. Something must have happened. Nevertheless, I paused for a last glance in the mirror and then, deciding I’d kept him waiting long enough, headed towards the door of my flat.
I should give him a key, just as he’d given one to me. We spent enough time together to justify it. But a key meant commitment, and no matter how much I longed for him, I wasn’t ready for that.
You must be keen to see me. The words in my head died on my lips as I lifted the latch, and thank God they did. It wasn’t Marcus who stood there with an impatient scowl; it was Eilidh.
Her scowl died the moment I opened the door, replaced by a winning smile. ‘Okay, doll,’ she said, stepping over the threshold with the most extravagant shrug and a toss of her long hair. ‘You win. I’ve come to be reasonable and civil, and I suppose I owe you an apology. I was a complete bitch. Sorry.’
I stepped back to let her in, my mind in a whirl. Marcus could arrive at any moment, and Eilidh’s sudden surrender to sweet reason could have nothing other than an ulterior motive. The last thing I needed was for them to meet without careful planning. I must get her out. ‘You’re lucky you caught me. I’m on my way out.’
‘I can’t stay anyway.’ She tossed her head. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Joe up in town. But after that grim lunch yesterday, I just thought I might come and have a wee chat and see if—’
‘See if you can make me see sense?’
‘You said it, not me. I’m not going to lie to you. You aren’t exactly flavour of the month at home.’
‘Is that my fault?’
‘Yes. Dad’s furious with you, and none of the rest of us particularly feel like speaking to you after the way you behaved. But Joe’s such a good, sweet soul that he managed to persuade me to come and talk to you, in the interests of peace and harmony.’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered, if you can’t be civil.’
‘I’m being civil. You’re the one being snippy. Be honest. You must see how stupid and unnecessary this whole thing is.’
I took a deep breath, and picked up my coat. ‘Sorry, Eilidh. I have to go out.’ If necessary, I’d leave and head Marcus off somewhere up the road, or head off in a different direction if she insisted on accompanying me, leaving him to call at an empty house. I’d explain later. He’d understand.
‘Spare me two minutes at least. I did try and phone before I came, but you didn’t answer.’
I never answered calls when I was stressed, but it never stopped her determined attempts to run me to ground. Eilidh was a terrier when she needed to be. ‘Okay then. Two minutes.’
She made a big thing of standing in front of the mirror in the hall and rearranging her curls behind her ear, just as I’d done, practising a smile and a pout. ‘Fine. You’ve upset everybody. Well done. Good start. The first thing you should remember is that isn’t the way to get what you want.’
‘If I upset everyone, it’s because I know my own mind and do what I want, instead of what you want. I’m not going to apologise for that.’
‘You never apologise for anything. Don’t you understand that we all want what’s best for you? You’re so bloody difficult. I’m only surprised that Dad never thought to put a private investigator onto you to find out what you’re up to. Because you never tell us anything.’
‘Because you always disapprove.’ I wound my scarf around my neck, with care.
‘And don’t you think there’s something to disapprove of? Eventually, we’ll all forgive you. You’re Dad’s favourite, after all.’
‘Sure.’ I zipped up my jacket, tucking the tasselled end of the scarf into it.
‘Yes, you get away with all sorts of things Cat and I would never have dared. God knows how. But I don’t want you sitting here getting all self-righteous when you’re the one in the wrong, so I thought I’d better come and tell you. It’ll be a while before we get over this.’
I took another deep breath. Righteous indignation was one thing. Eilidh’s patronising bad temper was quite another. ‘That was your two minutes.’
‘No. Let me finish. I’m not so stupid as you think. I’ve looked up your policeman. My, he’s handsome. I’ll give you that. And brave, by the sound of it. No doubt he swept you off your feet while he was saving your life.’ She turned back from the mirror. ‘Of course, you feel obliged to him. I get that. And I’ve worked out exactly what’s happened to you. Stockholm Syndrome. I looked it up.’
It wasn’t the first time she’d levelled that accusation at me. The first time had been after Marcus and Nerissa had been cleared of any wrongdoing over Eden’s actions, and I’d had the temerity to suggest that the matter should be allowed to rest.
‘Sure. That must be it. I’ll go to the doctor and get some pills.’
‘Don’t joke about it. I’m serious. You’re a classic case of someone who feels attracted to someone who’s abused you, just because they pretend to care for you.’
‘Eilidh. Marcus doesn’t—’
‘You only have to look at yourself. You’re kidding yourself that you feel for him, because he was there through that whole Eden business, and you think he’ll protect you. But it was his fault.’
‘That’s complete crap. Nobody’s holding me hostage. No-one’s manipulating me. The only people who are trying to control me are you and Dad.’
‘Seriously? You think he doesn’t have something to gain from you?’
‘It’s none of your business how I feel about Marcus. I’ll see him as long as I want to, and I’ll stop when I don’t want to see him any more. That’s all you need to know.’ I stalked off into the living room to find my phone.
Marcus had texted. Running a few minutes late xx. At least I could breathe a little more easily.
She followed me, looking around for any signs of him, pouncing on a sweatshirt he’d left behind and which I’d left on the chair ready to return to him. ‘This is his?’ She picked it up and pressed her face into it. ‘Mmmm…I have to hand it to you. He smells gorgeous.’
I snatched it off her, scandalised. ‘Just go. I’m in a hurry and you must be, too. And you — and everyone else — can just stop patronising me and bullying me. I’m in charge of my own life, okay?’
‘So much in charge that we always have to pick up the pieces when you choose the wrong man and end up in an emotional state.’ She stepped back and looked at me. She had Dad’s eyes, but hers were cold and judgmental where his sparked like iron off stone. ‘Let me be serious for a minute. You were a wreck after the G8 summit. The only people you can depend on are your family — we’re the only ones who don’t want something from you, and the only ones who’ll never let you down.’
My fingers tightened round my phone. Eden had let me down so badly, had two-timed me with another woman even as he two-timed both of us with a wife. Marcus had known about it all the time. He still kept secrets from me. He never told me about his work, but he used it and the confidentiality in which it was shrouded, as an excuse for every arrangement he cancelled. If he wanted to cheat on me, he’d given himself every opportunity. I should reject him, for that reason alone. ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
‘Remember that when it all falls apart,’ she retorted. ‘We’ll be there for you. We always will. I just hope you appreciate us when it happens.’
‘Goodbye, Eilidh. I’ll see you next Sunday for lunch.’
‘You’d better be ready with your apologies.’ She flounced out, just as I’d flounced out of the dining room the day before, and I slammed the door behind her, barely managing to resist the temptation to lock it in case she came back.
The doorbell went again a few minutes later, and I was trembling when I opened it, consumed by the fear that Eilidh had decided that she hadn’t said enough and had come back to fire a few more shots across my bows. T
his time, the ring on the doorbell was more measured, and my relief must have been evident when I opened it.
‘Oh, thank God it’s you!’
‘Bad day?’ Marcus gathered me up in his arms for a hug that calmed me. For that moment when Eilidh had raised the ghost I’d struggled so hard to lay to rest, I’d been concerned. I’d remembered that I trusted nobody, not even him. But his soothing presence put that aside, for a moment at least. I knew it would keep on whispering in my head and I’d never be able to silence it.
‘It’s been pretty bad,’ I agreed, letting him go with some reluctance. ‘And it followed on from a bad weekend. Like night following day, really. I should be used to it by now.’
‘That was your sister?’ He began to take off his coat then stopped. ‘Are we staying in or going out?’
‘We’ll go out.’ I wouldn’t risk her changing her mind and coming back. ‘How did you know it was her?’
‘I passed her in the street. I recognised her from the photos.’ He nodded towards the mantelpiece where my family kept an unforgiving watch over me from the confines of a silver photo frame. ‘I saw her coming out of the flat as I was coming along the street. But don’t worry — I made damned sure she didn’t see me.’
He wasn’t a cop for nothing. ‘God knows what happened after the big fallout yesterday, but they must have decided to send Eilidh, pretending she’s a peace envoy. Only I wasn’t fooled. She was here to pull me to heel.’
‘I can’t believe it worked.’ A smile lurked around the corners of his lips.
‘She says I’m suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, and you’re manipulating me.’
He laughed at that. ‘Stockholm Syndrome is a real thing. We come across it from time to time. But I don’t think you have it.’
‘She isn’t diplomatic at the best of times. Cat would have done it better. She’s reasonable, and she wasn’t there for the row. I’m guessing Eilidh was the only one available to come over and lecture me to my face. They know I won’t answer my phone when I’m stressed.’
‘Sunday was really bad then?’ he asked, surveying my face gravely.
‘If my mum had tried to soften my dad up beforehand, then it might not have been. But she didn’t, or she wouldn’t.’ Or else she knew that this was too big an issue to smooth over. ‘I never got the chance to explain that you aren’t actually a monster who eats little children and drinks their blood. Although actually, I don’t suppose that would have been as bad as you being—’
‘An English protestant policeman?’ He laughed. ‘I know you feel I pushed you into it. But I’m glad you told them.’
No-one in their right mind likes secrets. ‘It’ll take them some time to get used to it, but no-one pushes me around.’
‘I know that.’
‘They should know by now,’ I said, as he preceded me out of the flat. The blonde girl was there again, sitting on the opposite side of the street this time, looking her watch. This must be the place she chose to meet her boyfriend, just as Marcus and I so often chose to meet at the bridge over the Water of Leith. The thought made me smile. ‘I won’t give you up on their say-so.’
If the pain and stress of old memories, reawakened by Andy’s crusading vitality, became too much to bear, I might have to give him up. But if I did, it would be my own choice, not anyone else’s.
Chapter 22
The girl, Celina thought, had a kind face. She dwelt on its goodness as Cas steered the car back up the motorway in silence, stroking the luxurious fabric of her new coat with her forefinger as she did so. Yes, a kind face. A smiling face, but perhaps that was because she was so obviously in love, gazing up at the man’s face as they walked along the pavement, oblivious to anyone else while he had gazed down at her with his cat-got-the-cream smile.
She slid a sideways look at Cas as he pulled off the dual carriageway and turned the car up into the town. The sign, strange in English and stranger still in Gaelic, meant nothing to her. Pitlochry. Baile Chloichridh. Perhaps visitors to Poland raised their eyebrows in the same manner at the sight of unusual place names, shaking their heads in confusion and isolation.
Beside her, Cas crinkled his brows in concentration, keeping his head dipped downwards as he drove through the town, as if he didn’t want anyone to see him.
‘Was it all right?’ she asked him, suddenly anxious. ‘Did I do okay?’
He turned his head and smiled at her, tossing his over-long, pale brown hair as if it were a lion’s mane, one hand resting on the steering wheel and the other clenched, white-knuckled, around the gear stick. ‘Of course. You did really well.’
Still the woman’s latent kindness gnawed at her. She looked like someone who would help. As she’d loitered on the wall waiting to find out something about the strangers whom Cas suspected of suspecting something, it had occurred to Celina that she might walk across and lay her hand upon the woman’s arm, and say: help me. And that, if she did so, all would be well.
She banished the thought. It was too much of a risk, both in the long game of the rest of her life and to her relationship with Cas. Without him, she would be lost. ‘Will I have to go back into the city again?’
‘God knows.’ He shook his head in what looked like frustration. ‘Probably. I don’t know. He never tells me anything.’
‘Who? Your friend?’
‘Dougie. Yes.’ Tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, he raised a hand in acknowledgement to an acquaintance, then took a sharp turn up the hill to the right. ‘I should have gone the back way. The last thing I need is any more questions.’
Schooled in the art of evasiveness, Celina turned her head away from the street and put a hand up in front of her face. So now there was someone else who’d seen them, who might ask questions. Surely discovery was now only a matter of time, and the only question left to answer was whether she could find Jan before disaster broke.
The bitter taste of despair caught in her throat as she thought of the couple, complete and content. ‘They can’t know who we are. Can they?’
Cas’s mind must have been harping on the same nagging problem. ‘They were too busy looking at each other to see us. But yes. I’ll tell Dougie he needs to take a turn at looking out for them. It’s fine him sending us, but we maybe don’t want them to see you too often.’
Yer Man didn’t seem the type to take a telling. It was only too obvious that Cas, so good-natured, so averse to confrontation, was under his thumb. ‘Why do you let him push you around so much?’
He set his lips in a thin line. ‘He doesn’t. No-one does.’
‘Then why are we even doing this? You don’t know, and I don’t think you want to. So, it must be because he tells you to.’
‘God knows,’ he said again, in a way that slammed the door on any further discussion. He turned the car off the main street and began bumping it up into the desolation of the hills.
It took less than fifteen minutes to travel from the tourist hub of Pitlochry up to the farmhouse, but it might as well have taken a month. Shifting uncomfortably in the seat, Celina became fully aware of their isolation, of how easy it had been to become trapped. Of course, she could have asked the girl for help. She could have asked any passing stranger with a kind face, or gone running into a shop, or anything, once she was out of the car. It was what would happen afterwards that stopped her.
One of life’s hard lessons was that you could only gamble if you were prepared to lose and pay the price. She had no passport, and faced the prospect of prison for stealing. She might be sent back to Poland. Worst of all was the fear that wherever she ended up, she would be separated from Jan and he wouldn’t cope without her.
‘Go and make sure the others have their dinner,’ Cas instructed, as they pulled up outside the farmhouse. ‘I need to speak to Dougie.’
She got out of the car and he was on the phone before she’d crossed the yard, speaking slowly and urgently. She visualised Yer Man, a scowl on his face as something didn’t suit him. If only there wa
s something she could do to help.
Maybe prison was where Jan’s desperate adventure had ended. And if that was the case, the gamble had already failed.
*
Later, when it had long gone dark and Cas ended the evening with his hand curled defensively around a tall glass of beer, Celina drew on her desperation to press him on the subject he proved so reluctant to discuss. ‘What did your friend say?’
‘About what?’ He lifted the glass to his lips.
Perched on the edge of her armchair, afflicted by the tension which so beset him, she sipped her own glass trying to be ladylike, because that was what he liked. ‘About today.’
‘Oh. That.’
‘You know I’ll do anything you want me to, but I don’t understand how it can help.’ When she’d crossed the yard back towards the bunkhouse with supper for the others, he’d still been sitting there, talking into his phone. This time, rather than anger or frustration, his expression had been one of despair.
‘That,’ he said again. ‘I told you. Dougie thought we needed to find out who they were and whether they could remember anything.’
Yer Man again, driving everything they did. ‘We know who they are. We know where they live. What else is there to find out?’
‘But we don’t know what they know. We don’t know what they think.’ He stared into the depths of the log fire and frowned. For the first time, she sensed that he was ready to confide in her.
‘Then can we ask them about Jan?’
‘God, yes.’ He frowned again. ‘But maybe not straight away. We need to go softly-softly on that. Dougie says the most important thing is that they don’t tell the police anything else.’
Nervous, she put her glass down on the floor and crept across to sit next to him on the sofa. His answers were incomplete, his justification for his actions unconvincing, but she had to trust him. It wasn’t just that he was the only certainty she had in the world now that Jan had gone. It was that she was beginning to care for him, about how he felt.
She thought again about the girl’s face. ‘They aren’t thinking about us. If they did see Jan, they won’t say anything unless we ask them.’
Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3) Page 14
